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This paper introduces a community‐accessible dataset comprising daily hydroclimatic variables (precipitation, temperature, and streamflow) observed in 50 catchments in Sweden (median size of 1019 km2). The dataset covers a 60‐year period (1961–2020) and includes information on geographical location, landcover, soil classes, hydrologic signatures, and regulation for each catchment. Data were collected from various sources, such as the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Swedish Geological Survey, and several Copernicus products provided by the European Environment Agency. The compiled, spatially‐matched, and processed data are publicly available online through the Swedish National Data Service (https://snd.se/en), contributing a new region to the collection of existing CAMELS (Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large‐sample Studies) datasets. The CAMELS‐SE dataset spans a wide range of hydroclimatic, topographic, and environmental catchment properties, making it a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners to study hydrological processes, climate dynamics, environmental impacts, and sustainable water management strategies in Nordic regions. We present an openly accessible dataset of daily hydroclimatic variables—precipitation, temperature, and streamflow—across 50 Swedish catchments from 1961 to 2020. This comprehensive 60‐year dataset includes not only geographical coordinates and landcover details, but also soil classifications, hydrologic signatures, and regulation data for each catchment. Spanning diverse hydroclimatic, topographic, and environmental catchment properties, it serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners studying hydrological processes, climate dynamics, environmental impacts, and sustainable water management approaches within Nordic regions.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development gives equal emphasis to developed (“Northern”) countries and developing (“Southern”) countries. Thus, implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demands coherent collaboration to transform society across all countries. Yet, there has been little research published on SDG partnerships and this is the first study to explore the extent to which partners from Northern and Southern countries are involved in them and their focus. It identifies that involvement is unequally distributed and may perpetuate the North–South divide in countries’ resources, including access to data and scientific capacities. Most notably, partners from low-income countries are involved in far fewer partnerships than partners from countries in all other World Bank income categories, although the former are least able to develop sustainably. As such, all those promoting sustainable development from governmental, private and third-sector organisations need to address global inequalities in establishing and implementing SDG partnerships if, collectively, they are to facilitate delivery of Agenda 2030.

Hydrological modeling for climate-change impact assessment implies using meteorological variables simulated by global climate models (GCMs). Due to mismatching scales, coarse-resolution GCM output cannot be used directly for hydrological impact studies but rather needs to be downscaled. In this study, we investigated the variability of seasonal streamflow and flood-peak projections caused by the use of three statistical approaches to downscale precipitation from two GCMs for a meso-scale catchment in southeastern Sweden: (1) an analog method (AM), (2) a multi-objective fuzzy-rule-based classification (MOFRBC) and (3) the Statistical DownScaling Model (SDSM). The obtained higher-resolution precipitation values were then used to simulate daily streamflow for a control period (1961–1990) and for two future emission scenarios (2071–2100) with the precipitation-streamflow model HBV. The choice of downscaled precipitation time series had a major impact on the streamflow simulations, which was directly related to the ability of the downscaling approaches to reproduce observed precipitation. Although SDSM was considered to be most suitable for downscaling precipitation in the studied river basin, we highlighted the importance of an ensemble approach. The climate and streamflow change signals indicated that the current flow regime with a snowmelt-driven spring flood in April will likely change to a flow regime that is rather dominated by large winter streamflows. Spring flood events are expected to decrease considerably and occur earlier, whereas autumn flood peaks are projected to increase slightly. The simulations demonstrated that projections of future streamflow regimes are highly variable and can even partly point towards different directions.

During the last 6 decades, forest biomass has increased in Sweden mainly due to forest management, with a possible increasing effect on evapotranspiration. However, increasing global CO2 concentrations may also trigger physiological water-saving responses in broadleaf tree species, and to a lesser degree in some needleleaf conifer species, inducing an opposite effect. Additionally, changes in other forest attributes may also affect evapotranspiration. In this study, we aimed to detect the dominating effect(s) of forest change on evapotranspiration by studying changes in the ratio of actual evapotranspiration to precipitation, known as the evaporative ratio, during the period 1961–2012. We first used the Budyko framework of water and energy availability at the basin scale to study the hydroclimatic movements in Budyko space of 65 temperate and boreal basins during this period. We found that movements in Budyko space could not be explained by climatic changes in precipitation and potential evapotranspiration in 60 % of these basins, suggesting the existence of other dominant drivers of hydroclimatic change. In both the temperate and boreal basin groups studied, a negative climatic effect on the evaporative ratio was counteracted by a positive residual effect. The positive residual effect occurred along with increasing standing forest biomass in the temperate and boreal basin groups, increasing forest cover in the temperate basin group and no apparent changes in forest species composition in any group. From the three forest attributes, standing forest biomass was the one that could explain most of the variance of the residual effect in both basin groups. These results further suggest that the water-saving response to increasing CO2 in these forests is either negligible or overridden by the opposite effect of the increasing forest biomass. Thus, we conclude that increasing standing forest biomass is the dominant driver of long-term and large-scale evapotranspiration changes in Swedish forests.

Complex non-linear relationships exist between air and soil temperature responses to climate change. Despite its influence on hydrological and biogeochemical processes, soil temperature has received less attention in climate impact studies. Here we present and apply an empirical soil temperature model to four forest sites along a climatic gradient of Sweden. Future air and soil temperature were projected using an ensemble of regional climate models. Annual average air and soil temperatures were projected to increase, but complex dynamics were projected on a seasonal scale. Future changes in winter soil temperature were strongly dependent on projected snow cover. At the northernmost site, winter soil temperatures changed very little due to insulating effects of snow cover but southern sites with little or no snow cover showed the largest projected winter soil warming. Projected soil warming was greatest in the spring (up to 4°C) in the north, suggesting earlier snowmelt, extension of growing season length and possible northward shifts in the boreal biome. This showed that the projected effects of climate change on soil temperature in snow dominated regions are complex and general assumptions of future soil temperature responses to climate change based on air temperature alone are inadequate and should be avoided in boreal regions.

Despite growing recognition of the role of ecosystems in supporting water, energy, and food (WEF) sectors, there is limited research on how ecosystems are defined and operationalised into the WEF Nexus in practice. This article explores how the concept of ecosystems was understood and integrated in the European Union Horizon 2020 project NEXOGENESIS (NXG) that sought to incorporate ecosystems into an expanded WEFE Nexus. Based on semi-structured interviews with the project coordinator and respondents from five case studies in Europe and South Africa, the study identifies lessons learned and insights for future integration of ecosystems into similar projects. The findings reveal that most of the NXG case studies did not explicitly define ecosystems at the outset of the project and instead treated the concept as presumed background knowledge with a variety of interpretations. Ambiguity surrounding ecosystem definitions, overlaps with other sectors, and limited data availability made it challenging to operationalise and integrate ecosystems. This suggests that even a project with explicit aims to incorporate ecosystems into the WEF Nexus can remain limited in defining, measuring, and incorporating them into its work. The lessons learned from the NXG experience are developed into a practical guide for similar projects seeking to incorporate ecosystems into the Nexus. These reflective insights are intended to support future efforts to strengthen the role of ecosystems within Nexus research and practice.

In ancient India, air, water, and solar radiation were represented as gods and key components of water availability, food production, and energy generation. However, the linkage between modern science and ancient wisdom has not been well explored. In this study, we estimate the water–food–energy potential using various openly available data products and perform statistical analysis to establish the scientific basis behind the geographical alignment of eight prominent Shiva temples along the 79° meridian east to the north, known as the Shiva Shakti Aksh Rekha (SSAR). Results indicate a strong correlation between the SSAR belt and water–energy–food productivity potential, where 18.5% of the area can produce 44 × 10 6 tons of rice annually. With an estimated renewable energy generation potential of 596.6 GW, the SSAR belt could significantly contribute to India’s target of 500 GW of renewable energy production by 2030. This study highlights the potential role of traditional geographical alignments in supporting future water, energy, and food security in highly populated countries such as India.

In hydrological climate-change impact studies, regional climate models (RCMs) are commonly used to transfer large-scale global climate model (GCM) data to smaller scales and to provide more detailed regional information. Due to systematic and random model errors, however, RCM simulations often show considerable deviations from observations. This has led to the development of a number of correction approaches that rely on the assumption that RCM errors do not change over time. It is in principle not possible to test whether this underlying assumption of error stationarity is actually fulfilled for future climate conditions. In this study, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to evaluate how well correction methods perform for conditions different from those used for calibration with the relatively simple differential split-sample test. For five Swedish catchments, precipitation and temperature simulations from 15 different RCMs driven by ERA40 (the 40 yr reanalysis product of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)) were corrected with different commonly used bias correction methods. We then performed differential split-sample tests by dividing the data series into cold and warm respective dry and wet years. This enabled us to cross-evaluate the performance of different correction procedures under systematically varying climate conditions. The differential split-sample test identified major differences in the ability of the applied correction methods to reduce model errors and to cope with non-stationary biases. More advanced correction methods performed better, whereas large deviations remained for climate model simulations corrected with simpler approaches. Therefore, we question the use of simple correction methods such as the widely used delta-change approach and linear transformation for RCM-based climate-change impact studies. Instead, we recommend using higher-skill correction methods such as distribution mapping.

Low‐order streams are suggested to dominate the atmospheric CO2 source of all inland waters. Yet, many large‐scale stream estimates suffer from methods not designed for gas emission determination and rarely include other greenhouse gases such as CH4. Here, we present a compilation of directly measured CO2 and CH4 concentration data from Swedish low‐order streams (> 1600 observations across > 500 streams) covering large climatological and land‐use gradients. These data were combined with an empirically derived gas transfer model and the characteristics of a ca. 400,000 km stream network covering the entire country. The total stream CO2 and CH4 emission corresponded to 2.7 Tg C yr−1 (95% confidence interval: 2.0–3.7) of which the CH4 accounted for 0.7% (0.02 Tg C yr−1). The study highlights the importance of low‐order streams, as well as the critical need to better represent variability in emissions and stream areal extent to constrain future stream C emission estimates.

There is a global call for proactive drought risk management, stressing the need to further our understanding of the systemic nature of drought risk. Proactive drought risk management requires an understanding of not only the drought hazard itself, but also the underlying vulnerabilities in sociohydrological systems. As a result, drought vulnerability assessments are increasingly being conducted across the globe. However, drought vulnerability is complex and shaped by the social, ecological, and hydroclimatic context. Thus, understanding how vulnerability is manifested depending on regional, sectoral, or societal differences is crucial. Therefore, here we present an assessment of the practical relevance and relative impact of various drought vulnerability factors for water-dependent sectors and societies in forested cold climates. The analysis was based on the results of an online survey conducted in Sweden, targeting stakeholders from seven water-dependent sectors, working in authorities, private and public enterprises, NGOs, and trade associations. Respondents were asked to rate a comprehensive list of vulnerability factors, connected to sectoral and societal vulnerability as well as governance, based on their perceived impact on drought risk in their sector as well as for society as a whole. Results showed that the relevance and impact of individual vulnerability factors differed across sectors, with the forestry sector especially standing out compared to other sectors. Furthermore, the results indicate regional differences in societal vulnerability factors. The substantial list of vulnerability factors found to be relevant by the respondents demonstrates the complex nature of drought risk, as well as the importance of using caution when selecting generic vulnerability factors for applied vulnerability assessments. Furthermore, the results provide a comprehensive guide to both sectoral and societal drought vulnerability in sociohydrological systems located in forested cold climates.